


the way you know me, for where you know me

by petasos



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Violence, Kissing, Nonbinary Roxy Lalonde, Post-Canon, The Homestuck Epilogues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:22:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24416557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petasos/pseuds/petasos
Summary: healing comes in it's own way.(alternatively titled: dirk, jane, jake, and roxy deal with the aftermath of two other universes.)
Relationships: Jane Crocker/Jake English/Roxy Lalonde/Dirk Strider
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17
Collections: Homestuck Polyswap 2020 - Prospit





	the way you know me, for where you know me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avosettas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avosettas/gifts).



> hiiii giftee! loved this prompt, HAD to write it. i was hit with a sudden burst of inspiration and wrote all of this in an hour and then spent a day editing it, but honestly, i'm really in love with this? i love these characters and i really hope i captured them all properly in this... but you'll have to tell me!
> 
> title from "come under the covers" by walk the moon

There are mornings where Dirk wakes up, long before he usually does, crying. There are mornings where he sits on the balcony of the apartment he shares with his three best friends, and he tries not to cry any more than he already has. His eyes hurt, his throat hurts, and his face would taste like salt if licked. He remembers dying. He remembers hurting people, remembers manipulating Rose, things he is entirely capable of (apparently.)

He doesn’t want to forget, because that was him.

It’s always Roxy who finds him. Sweet, beautiful Roxy. They’ve been wearing their hair shorter, lately, but it still curls. They’re not sure where they stand on the gender thing, but Dirk knows that they know that he doesn’t care. Well - he does care. Of course he cares. They’re his Roxy, regardless of gender or name or pronouns. It’s been they/them lately, was he/him for a bit - but mostly it’s just what it is.

And they bring him coffee. Every time. Just the right amount of milk and sugar, and they stand next to him, where his legs are pushed through the railing - it’s a bitch to pull them back out. They don’t say anything, they just watch the sun rise with him, sip at their own coffee as they lean against the railing, their arms crossed.

“It’s a beautiful day,” says Roxy.

Dirk says nothing.

“Dirk,” says Roxy, “that wasn’t you.”

“But it was, wasn’t it?” he asks, and takes a drink of his coffee (their coffee) and stares at the birds on the trees outside their apartment, at the way the sunlight trickles through the leaves and branches. “I’m a shitty person, but we already knew that, didn’t we? Remember when I sent Jake my own fucking head, remember when I pestered the living shit out of him?”

“Yeah,” says Roxy, “but we were kids, and _that_ was you. What that Dirk did - _that_ wasn’t you. You’d never kill yourself and leave us alone.”

“But wouldn’t I?”

“No,” they say, and slide down, their back against the railing, putting a hand on his bare shoulder. “You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t leave me behind.”

“I think I would,” he says.

“Nah, y’wouldn’t, because you know I have way too many issues,” they say, and laugh into their mug, and Dirk looks at them with golden-orange eyes that match the sunrise and they look back at him with vibrant pink eyes that match it too, and he takes their hand.

  


Some nights, Jane doesn’t sleep - it’s too hard to, when her dreams consist of memories she wants to bury. She hurt Jake. She hurt other people. Sometimes, her arms yearn for Jake’s, her hands yearn for Gamzee’s, her heart yearns for her son, but she’s glad those are just memories like scars, like sandpaper grating against her skin, because that wasn’t her. As far as she’s concerned, that wasn’t real - it was just a horrific convergence of someone else’s memories with her own (and maybe it was, but the opposite rings worse.)

Jake and Dirk and Roxy all give her space when she asks, but better than that, they know her well enough to not give her space when she doesn’t really need it. When she’s sitting on the couch watching some cop drama, and Roxy plops down with two cups of cocoa, she’s glad for her friend being there. When she’s curled up in her room, away from the noise, and Dirk comes in and says nothing, just sits on the edge of her bed, she’s thankful.

It’s rarely Jake, but when it is, she’s more thankful than ever. He’s forgiven her, and she doesn’t know why - Jake’s forgiven Dirk, too, and she’ll never understand how he can do that, she remembers the horrible things they both did. But they didn’t do those, did they?

Jake takes her out camping one weekend and they scream at each other for three hours straight on the second night and Jane tells him that she hates him and he tells her that he loves her and Jane threatens to lose herself in the woods.

She doesn’t. But she threatens to.

“I do love you,” he says, and she ends up collapsing in his arms, a sobbing mess in their tent, and she remembers moments like these in another lifetime, another Jane’s existence, and it aches deep to the bones. Jane holds him back, and they don’t touch like lovers - she couldn’t bear to touch him like that.

And he gets it, he does. They sit out by the fire, and roast marshmallows, crack jokes about their roommates back home. She doesn’t sleep that night, but it’s okay, because she has him by her side. And, frankly, she’d rather have him than nothing at all.

But she’d rather he have someone else, because as much as she likes to say that wasn’t her, it was. In some roundabout way, she’s capable of starting wars, of hurting Jake, of being a person who doesn’t deserve what she has now.

But she stares at him while he sleeps - and he trusts her enough to sleep beside her - and she sobs, noiselessly, until the birds chirp in the morning.

  


Roxy’s never sure how to look at John anymore. They had a child together. They had a marriage, a life. Nowadays, Roxy tends to stay as close to Jake as possible, if they aren’t with Dirk or Jane or Calliope (dear, sweet Calliope.) They don’t know what to do with their hands with John is around, but it doesn’t really matter, now does it? John’s trying to be happy on his own. They should be happy on their own, too.

Still, it hurts, sometimes. Roxy tends to find themself with Jane when it hits the worst. Jane lost a child, too, even if that child never fully existed in the first place. Two narrators set to battle, and they were torn apart in the process, their little family of four.

“I wish I could remember his face,” they tell Jane, and Jane laughs, one bright morning, cooking bacon and pancakes.

“I wish I couldn’t,” says Jane. “Tavros looked so much like John and Jake that sometimes I see them both and want to scratch my skin off.”

Roxy snatches a piece of bacon, hoists themself up onto the counter, and stares at their apartment - they got it together, when they woke up, clinging to each other like children desperate and needy, begging the others not to leave after what they’d seen. It’s a nice apartment, when it’s not dirty like this - Dirk’s robotics parts littering the floor, movie posters on the walls, cords stringing across the hallways, the scent of baked goods always in the air.

“I miss being a mom,” says Roxy. “But I don’t think I’d ever do it again.”

“I don’t, either. I’d be a horrible mother.”

“That’s not true. You’d be a great mom. Hell, I’d be a mom with you. We can just have a kid together. Should’ve done it in that universe, too.”

Jane laughs at them, and hands them another piece of bacon. “I feel like that would be making far too many mistakes in one go. Take me out to dinner first, why don’t you?”

“I have,” they say, “and I will again.”

It’s been years since Jane, Roxy, and Calliope had dinner together - so long ago that Roxy barely remembers it. They don’t remember what lead up to it, and they don’t remember what came after, but they remember it as a bright, gleaming moment in time, untouched by the horror surrounding it.

“I forgot about that,” says Jane.

“I didn’t,” says Roxy, and they don’t say anything else.

  


Jake tears down his company hand-by-hand. He never wanted this damn company in the first place, he just wanted to make his grandmother proud, and in the end, where did it get him? _Rumble In The Pumpkin Patch_ is canceled after three glorious seasons, and Jake sets out to do what he’s always wanted to do with his life: he winds up in an underground fight club.

Well, maybe it’s not quite what he wanted to do, but he does it regardless. And it feels good, getting kicked in the face or the groin or the chest. It feels good to punch and hit and claw and scratch. It feels good to ignore the look on Jane and Roxy’s faces when they catch sight of a bruise, because they don’t need to know why, and frankly he doesn’t want them to.

It’s hard to remember the fact that in two timelines, he was used, and berated, and beat. And maybe he deserved it then, but he’s taking his life into his own hands now, and he’s making do with what he has.

It’s Dirk, who tracks him down, and pulls him away from a fight that could get dangerous. It’s Dirk, with a frown on his face, who tells him, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Shove off, Strider,” is what Jake says in response, and Dirk sighs.

“I deserve that, I do, but you don’t - you don’t deserve to go out here and get hurt.”

Jake shrugs, rolls his eyes behind his slightly-broken glasses. His nose is broken, too, and he said he ran into a tree while sprinting a few weeks ago (and nobody believed him but he didn’t care if they did or didn’t.)

“Maybe I do,” he says.

“You don’t,” says Dirk, who punches him on the shoulder, hard enough it’ll bruise. “I don’t give a shit what I said in that other universe, what Jane said, but that’s not you. You’re worth more than being a pretty face or having a nice ass.”

Jake looks, pointedly, away from him. “You didn’t seem to think that then.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the truth. Now, we’re going home, and you’re gonna tell Roxy and Jane what the hell you’ve been up to.”

“I don’t think they deserve to know!”

“Yeah, they do, they’re your family. I’m your family, dumbass. Family sticks together, and we don’t lie to each other. It’s not like you’re doing this for money -” Dirk’s arm sweeps out across the shitty gym they’re standing in, people cheering for Xenon to come out and kick ass. “You’re just doing this to get hurt, and you know I could build a way fucking better robot to kick your ass for you, since you’re so inclined to do such.”

“Maybe I don’t want your help or sympathy, Dirk.”

“Do I look like I care what you want?”

He doesn’t, and in the end, Jake ends up going home with him - and he doesn’t cry.

  


Dirk’s spent a very long time ignoring the obvious, but therapy ends up helping. His therapist is a young troll woman with a first name Dirk can’t remember and horns shaped like asterisks, and she does her damn best to pull Dirk out of himself. Ironically (or perhaps now), it’s Jane who ends up coming along with him some days, and she sits there and listens and says nothing. His therapist always asks why she comes, and Jane says, “This isn’t couple’s therapy,” and that’s that.

But Dirk wonders, and he asks her, one day, why she does. And Jane says, “It’s because I want to know how you can treat me like I’m not her, but how you can’t treat yourself like you weren’t him.”

“Because that _was_ me, and that _wasn’t_ you.”

“Oh, so I’m incapable of being an abusive dictator who cheats on her husband in the name of quadrants when she claims to hate trollkind, emotionally abuses her son and husband, and -”

Dirk cuts her off, standing in the parking lot at the support center. “We’re all capable of doing horrible things. Me more than anyone else.”

“Do you not remember how I acted when that tiaratop was on my head?”

“Yeah, and that wasn’t you, either.”

“But wasn’t it?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Then,” says Jane, “stop treating yourself like you’re him, too. If you can look at me and not see _her_ after everything that’s happened, stop looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing him. You aren’t him.”

Dirk taps the side of his shades. “Bullshit.”

And Jane grabs the shades right off his face, throws them to the ground, and smashes them under her foot.

“What the fuck was that for?” he asks, voice dry.

She laughs at him, and she’s crying, and she says, “I can’t stand to see you wearing those.”

“Me neither,” he admits, and they go home.

He throws out the other pairs.

Jane burns everything she owns that’s red.

They hold each other in the backyard, standing too close to the flames, and Jane kisses his cheek, and he holds her hand.

  


Jane and Roxy don’t tend to talk about what happened in those other universes (unless it’s their kids.) Sometimes, they sleep in Roxy’s bed - it’s a little too big, and incredibly comfortable, and Jane doesn’t mind shuffling around to fit both of them in it. She’s never told Roxy how much she loves them, but she thinks they know - by now, isn’t it obvious?

She doesn’t have to kiss them to love them.

She doesn’t have to do anything at all.

But one night, she wakes up to the muffled sounds of Roxy sobbing, and she curls her arms around her friend, and Roxy doesn’t push her away but turns in on her, their eyes rimmed with tears that smear across Jane’s nightgown. She doesn’t mind, of course. It’s nothing.

“I dreamed about Dirk dying,” says Roxy, and Jane runs a hand through their hair.

“He’s okay. He’s alive.”

“I know he is,” they say, “but it doesn’t stop hurting. Sometimes I remember his funeral so vividly I think I’m there again, but I’m not, because he’s okay, and he’s… he’s not going to do that to me, I know that.”

Sometimes Jane wonders how true that is, but she never says anything. “I dreamt about Gamzee dying,” she says.

“Do you miss him?”

“Yes. No. I don’t think it matters.”

“It does,” says Roxy.

Jane kisses them instead of answering, and pulls away without an apology on her lips. Roxy leans back in, presses their mouth to hers, and they hold each other like that until dawn comes, and Jane makes them waffles with the waffle maker and they hold hands through half the day.

They don’t tell Dirk and Jake, because Dirk and Jake already know.

  


Roxy takes Jake out to the shooting range twice a week, and they spend hours at a time shooting the shit and literally shooting things, wearing pink earmuffs Roxy alchemized up to be comfortable and deafening. They grab ice cream after, every single time, and it’s cotton candy for Jake and chocolate for Roxy, and they buy a pint of peanut butter that Jake threatens to eat every time but winds up in Jane’s stomach.

“If I kissed Jane, that would kill me,” he says, one night, when Roxy’s putting it in the fridge. “Sometimes I still think about kissing Jane. Is that wrong?”

“No,” says Roxy, “because I do, too.”

“You’re practically dating her. I don’t think that counts.”

They laugh at him, elbowing him a little as they close the fridge door and stumble towards the living room. It’s not really stumbling, there’s just shit in the way. “You’re practically dating Dirk, but you haven’t died yet, and he eats that shit too.”

“I am not dating Dirk.”

“You sleep in the same bed.”

“So do we,” he says.

“So do Jane and Dirk. So do you and Jane. So do Dirk and me.”

“Perhaps we’re all dating,” says Jake, and they laugh at him, climbing onto the couch and pulling him over with them, and he lands on their lap and looks up at them with a sheepish smile. “The world’s ended enough times that I don’t think it’d be wrong if we did.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t,” says Roxy, and kisses him, too. He tastes like cotton candy ice cream. He tastes like chocolate, too, when they’re done kissing him. “Don’t you think it’s shitty, how fucked up we were in other timelines, and yet - we’re just as bad here, except it’s only at ourselves?”

“Oh, yes, I do. Frankly, it’s rather ridiculous.” He kisses them again, and they smile against his mouth, forehead leaning against his. “I’ve never kissed you before. I don’t think I mind it at all. We should do this more often.”

“I agree,” says Roxy, and keeps kissing him until the sun sets completely.

  


Jake kisses Jane on a Saturday, and Dirk the following Sunday. The former is a dreary day, with no sunlight streaming through the windows, and Jane is bemoaning the plants on the windowsill that she completely decimated with her lack of green thumb. Jake’s staring at the brown leaves on her mint, and he says, “You could always use your life powers.”

“Oh,” says Jane, “do you think I could?”

“Yes,” he says.

She waves her hand over the plant, and it flourishes back to life, and she laughs a little. It’s a musical little sound, and doesn’t remind him at all of his wife (of her, in another time.) It’s a good noise, and when he walks towards her to look at the plant, the differences between his Jane and that Jane are too obvious. The freckles on her face, the sunburn on her shoulders, the way her hair’s growing out.

He puts his hands on either side of her face, and kisses her, and when she pulls back, he laughs.

“I’ve wanted to do that a while.”

“Why?” she asks, and she looks horrified.

“Because I do. Because you’re my Jane.”

“But I hurt you,” Jane says, and she turns away from him.

He puts his hands on her shoulders. “You didn’t. You could never hurt me, Jane.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to. If you want to ignore that I just kissed you -”

“You’ve been kissing Roxy, and, well, so have I. I don’t… well, I should say I expected this…” She looks at the ground when she turns to face him, and there’s a flush to her cheeks. “I just - I don’t want to hurt you again.”

“Jane, it’s been five years. If you were going to, you would’ve by now.”

And Jane smiles at that, her shoulders relaxing. “Maybe you’re right.”

“I know I am.”

  


The Sunday Jake kisses Dirk is a bright one, and Dirk’s sitting in the kitchen, watching his three best friends lounging across the couch, their limbs intertwined. He’s sipping at his coffee, sun streaming through the windows, and he remembers a time about five years ago when they woke up to a storm, feeling hungover and sick to their stomachs, remembering the worst of themselves. This is a day exactly unlike that, and he’s watching his best friends kiss each other, and it doesn’t feel wrong.

None of this feels wrong. It just feels right.

“Hey, Dirk! Get over here!” Jake calls, and Dirk sets down his coffee, heads over. Jake pulls him onto the couch, too, and before Dirk can figure out what’s happening, Jake’s kissing him. And when Jake pulls away, Roxy is - and then Jane. And that doesn’t feel wrong, either, so he kisses them all back, laughing when he pulls back for proper air.

“We’ve been thinking,” says Roxy, and they’re grinning, and he remembers mornings spent with coffee, “that we should all just say fuck it to the norms, and kiss each other.”

“Like we’re doing now?” Dirk asks, dryly.

“Yes. Exactly like we’re doing right now,” says Jane, and her fingers find his, and he remembers burning clothes with her.

“I find it’s a brilliant idea,” says Jake, and Dirk can count up the scars on his body and know what came from fist-fights. “I love you, Dirk.”

“I love you, too,” says Dirk, for the first time, and he finds he means it. “I love all of you.”

  


One morning, Dirk Strider wakes up and looks in the mirror to find that his shades are black, and that he’s breathing through his lungs. One morning, Jane Crocker wakes up to find her bed empty, and that she’s not in the presidential suite or on an airship. One morning, Roxy Lalonde wakes up to find that they can’t reach out to John or Calliope. One morning, Jake English wakes up to find that he feels even more worthless than usual.

And every morning since, they slowly heal.

They heal, in bits and pieces, separate and together. They heal at their own rates, growing together and apart like waves across the beach. They move in together without even considering why, keys exchanged and bedrooms claimed - but in the end, those keys and bedrooms change hands with ease.

They heal, trickling like molasses, and they never stop.

And most importantly, they love.


End file.
